Norman Granz

NORMAN GRANZ, who has died in Geneva aged 83, was the most successful impresario in the history of jazz, and an early and effective campaigner against racial discrimination in America, refusing to allow segregated audiences at any of his events.

Granz's "Jazz At The Philharmonic" tours brought leading musicians to audiences all over the world, while his activities as a record producer account for a sizeable proportion of the finest jazz ever recorded. His insistence on good pay and decent conditions for his artists raised standards all round and contributed to improving the status of jazz everywhere.

As their personal manager for many years, Granz skilfully guided the careers of both Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson.

Norman Granz was born in Los Angeles on August 6 1918, into a family of Ukrainian-Jewish ancestry. After school, he began work as a stock clerk on the Los Angeles stock exchange. When America joined the Second World War, he was drafted into the US Army Air Force. Subsequently, he was posted to the Morale branch, the department charged with troops' entertainment. He supervised the production of the short film Jammin' The Blues, featuring Lester Young, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1944.

In the same year, outraged at the racial discrimination practised even in Los Angeles's jazz nightclubs, Ganz began hiring club premises on Monday nights, when they were usually closed, and presenting racially mixed bands to integrated audiences. Encouraged by the response, he hired the Philharmonic Auditorium on June 6 1944 and put on a public jam session to raise money for a civil liberties cause.

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This was the beginning of Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP), a touring concert package of top names which travelled around America's principal cities and later the world. In February 1953, JATP played two shows in London, the first concert by American jazz musicians since before the Second World War. A dispute between the British and American musicians' unions had kept them out, but by donating the proceeds to the victims of that winter's disastrous floods, Granz managed to breach the ban, to the incredulous delight of British jazz lovers.

When it came to his social agenda, Granz was completely candid. His first aim, he told Down Beat magazine in 1951, was "to promote tolerance and the elimination of racial discrimination". It made no kind of sense, he insisted, "to treat a musician with respect and dignity on stage and then make him go round to the back door when he was off stage. We were battling not only anti-black discrimination, but discrimination against all jazz musicians. I insisted that my players were given the same respect as Leonard Bernstein or Heifetz."

Dizzy Gillespie, a frequent JATP performer, confirmed that this was no idle boast: "With Norman, you travelled first class, stayed at first-class hotels and never played anywhere there was segregated seating."

Granz was prepared to go to any lengths in his pursuit of fair treatment. On one occasion he spent $2,000 in lawyer's fees fighting a trumped-up, $50 charge against Ella Fitzgerald for "promoting gambling" by playing craps with Gillespie in her dressing room.

By the mid-1950s, Granz's musical empire was worth an estimated $5 million. It included not only JATP but two record labels, Norgran and Clef. The roster of artists under contract featured almost every great name in jazz - Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Art Tatum, Stan Getz, Count Basie, and Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald.

In 1956, Granz subsumed the two labels into a new company, Verve Records. It was on Verve that Ella Fitzgerald's celebrated "Songbook" series appeared, a sequence of albums, each dedicated to a great American songwriter.

Only Frank Sinatra's classic Capitol recordings of the same period can be compared to the Songbooks as definitive versions of these songs. Perhaps the two best-known Fitzgerald performances of all - Manhattan and Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye - come from her Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter albums, respectively.

In 1961 Granz sold Verve to MGM for $2.5 million, and regular tours by JATP were discontinued in 1967.

By now Granz had moved to Switzerland, from where he continued to supervise the careers of Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson. But it seemed that he was winding down, perhaps to concentrate on his other passion, his collection of works by Picasso and Paul Klee. However, in 1973 he announced the launch of a new record label, Pablo, which quickly became successful.

As well as a regular stream of Fitzgerald and Peterson albums, Pablo released some of the finest recorded work of the saxophonist Zoot Sims and guitarist Joe Pass. Two subsidiary labels were launched, Pablo Live (1977) and Pablo Today (1979), featuring such established names as Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan.

Granz finally sold Pablo to Fantasy records in 1987. He continued to manage Ella Fitzgerald until her death in 1996, and until recently was still overseeing Oscar Peterson's career.

Despite his vast contribution to jazz over more than half a century, Norman Granz received little or nothing in the way of official recognition, no important awards or citations.

Furthermore, he was always grudgingly treated by the jazz press. This may have been the result of simple envy, but more likely it was a reaction to Granz's somewhat imperious manner, coupled with his undisguised contempt for critics of all kinds.

The critics, in turn, made much of Ganz's petty failings, such as his tendency to interfere in recording sessions and insist on making inappropriate changes. It was Granz, for instance, who changed the words "South Pacific" to "My Fair Lady" in Ella Fitzgerald's Manhattan, thereby making a nonsense of the rhyme scheme.